"Thank you" answers are generally not very useful, especially if they appear in masses. Some questions are attracting especially many of them and should probably be cleaned up by a moderator. A data-dump query shows:

More thank you posts

If after these lists above someone would still feel the need to clean up even more - or just doesn't know what he should do the next month - a general query for LIKE %hank% shows many answers that don't add any value. With length(body) <= 100 basically all returned answers are not useful:

select
('http://stackoverflow.com/questions/' || to_char(id, 'FM9999999')),
body
from posts
where posttypeid = 2 and length(body) <= 100 and (body like '%hank%')
order by length(body);

This query returns 2725 records. That's too much (and too boring) to go through by hand, and a simple delete in the database would be too extreme, so I guess they are here to stay.

Cleaning them up when they start "clustering" like in the above questions is probably the way to go; single thank you posts don't add that much noise that they couldn't be tolerated.

That being said

... and kind of fitting the general topic of this post I want to add:

Thank you to all the moderators of the trilogy for spending their time for the good of us all, and for doing a very good job at it! You are always there when you are needed and make the sites a better place.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to post links to all of these. It's a big help.
–
Bill the LizardJan 4 '10 at 15:10

7

good stuff -- I'd like to turn some of these queries into reports we can run on our end
–
Jeff Atwood♦Jan 4 '10 at 18:01

All the purely-"thank you" answers I could find in those links were by unregistered or totally new users. Furthermore, the body of topics seems like a speck relative to the total number of topics. Is this really a problem? Should the solution mainly involve (gently) directing new users to the comment feature?
–
Mark CApr 12 '10 at 22:51

sth, looking at the odata.stackexchange.com query (thanks for setting that up!) I wonder if we could achieve a similar effect by looking at questions with lots of short-ish answers by 1 rep users. I don't know that the "thanks!" part is as telling as lots of short, low rep user "answers"
–
Jeff Atwood♦Jun 7 '10 at 7:37

@Jeff: Just looking for short, low rep posts also gives some good results, see odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/2450 (Excluding CW posts, because otherwise it's just working as an indicator to find questions most improper for SO)
–
sthJun 7 '10 at 11:23

Cleaning them up when they start "clustering" like in the above questions is probably the way to go, single thank you posts don't add that much noise that they couldn't be tolerated.

100% agree.

There is a general consensus/style on SO that attempts to limit the amount of discussion, so when you help a user with his or her specific problem, and they want to thank you for your help, I think this should be allowed because there are no other means through the site for this to happen. (And I think it would be redundant to mention the specifics of why this kind of interaction is important for a community-driven site.)

They can say thanks: in a comment below the answer. It is not an answer, and should not be posted as one.
–
George StockerJan 4 '10 at 14:29

Yeah, I was speaking generally, answers or comments. Certainly this type of communication should be done through comments, but a new user may be unfamiliar with how the system works.
–
Jon SeigelJan 4 '10 at 15:49

There's a giant box when they try to post an answer that asks them if they really want to post an Answer to their own question. How much more explicit can we be?
–
George StockerJan 4 '10 at 17:45

I agree with you: we can't. So there's no point trying to fix things beyond a reasonable amount of effort on our part. Taking a hard line on soft issues like this only results in people being put off, even though it makes sense to experienced users. And that was the point I was making in my answer. Business clients always read the docs before phoning us, right? ;)
–
Jon SeigelJan 4 '10 at 18:24

@Jeff Naturally answers are better, but users with insufficient rep don't try to post a comment, realize they can't, and give up. They think "wait, but I can just post an answer with the exact same text instead -- I'll do that!". I'm not suggesting that posting answers should require rep, I'm suggesting posting comments shouldn't -- I'd prefer generating comments to generating "answers" that contain text that belongs in comments
–
Michael MrozekJun 17 '10 at 18:00

1

@Jeff Atwood, I have to agree with Michael - someone who can't leave a comment just leaves an inappropriate answer instead. Better to be cluttered with spurious comments than spurious answers.
–
Mark RansomJun 22 '10 at 19:23

make the upvote button brighter, bigger and gooey. On being clicked it should spew thanks and little red hearts, with a message that the poster can see your love(or a message like the above). The poster who gets the upvote, should be able to see these hearts in proportion to the number of upvotes.

Number of red hearts = 100 x number of upvotes, with 2000 being the max.

(2000 as a maximum may be less for many and this number is up for debate.I am all for filling every pixel with hearts.)

Gooeyness of the hearts should also be calculated separately.

All the thank yous and hearts floating around the page will make quite a lot of SO users allergic to thank you posts for a long time.

I upvoted that comment and here is my Thank you!That tells me that upvotes should not be anonymous, then people might refrain from saying @name thank you +1. not that I mind it.
–
abelJan 8 '11 at 12:25